Let's not sugarcoat things: America's infrastructure took home a report card with a D+ average from the American Society for Civil Engineers in 2017. Older metro areas such as Boston and New York struggle with 100-year-old bridges and nearly 100-year-old tunnels. Growing metro areas such as North Texas have had to stretch federal highway funding that has been frozen at 1993 levels.

Now, the upside: The Dallas region, which adds more than 100,000 people a year, is better positioned for the future than many other metro regions thanks to Texas' regulatory environment, planning, and rapid advances in smart-traffic technologies. But we must remember that excessive government interference could easily cloud that future.

Here are four things North Texas is doing right on infrastructure.

1. High-speed rail: Texas laws grant eminent domain authority to railroads like the Texas Central Partners' high-speed rail project. This helps in the event railroads can't come to an agreement on property values with landowners. When completed, that rail line will connect the North Texas to Houston in just 90 minutes.

The Dallas Regional Chamber has supported legislation for developing this high-speed rail project. While similar projects are in the works elsewhere in the U.S., Texas Central appears furthest along in completing theirs — and it is privately funded.

2. Autonomous vehicles: Perhaps one of the most important new laws passed in Texas recently provides broad outlines for the use of autonomous vehicles without hamstringing innovations. Its relevance became self-evident earlier this month when the city of Frisco and the company Drive.AI announced Texas' first autonomous street shuttle would begin operation in July. While other cities are working on autonomous vehicles, Texas appears to be the first to schedule the use of a shuttle service on public streets.

3. Smart infrastructure: The 2017 Tom Tom Traffic Index indicated North Texas tied with the Dayton region for the least congested places out of 43 cities in the world with more than 5 million people. Even so, traffic can still be challenging around here. One antidote is to synchronize traffic flow rather than building wider streets. Frisco, Grapevine, Dallas and other North Texas cities have started the process of sharing their traffic data to improve stoplight timing. The city of Dallas authorized an $8.9 million contract with Ericsson to analyze the data collected at tens of thousands of intersections to synchronize traffic flow in Dallas. Eventually, that system might be used across a 10-city region.

4. Highway funding: The Regional Transportation Council of the North Texas Council of Governments recently approved a resolution to fill a $1 billion funding gap in one of state's biggest highway projects — the eastward expansion of Interstate 635 — using tolled lanes. That vote, and the state's approval to extend the use of tolls to pay that project, was crucial for the completion of that project.

Yet, the Texas Legislature hasn't declared its ongoing support for allowing local governments to employ user fees for new highways. Lawmakers need to restore support for toll roads, or Texas will continue to struggle with funding for years to come. Comparatively speaking, tolls in North Texas are minuscule in comparison with West Coast and East Coast cities like New York and San Francisco.

If there's a common thread here, it's that North Texas works when its leaders and people are given the freedom to find and implement solutions for some of our most difficult infrastructure riddles.

Wendy Lopez is the Gulf Southwest Transportation Business Line Leader for AECOM and chair of the Dallas Regional Chamber Infrastructure Task Force. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.